Channels

Services

Android applications flourish in the US

One and a half weeks after T-Mobile's first G1 Android phone became available in the US, application downloads from the Android Market are already flourishing. By last Wednesday, the Medialets advertising portal found 167 applications that were downloaded between 667,000 and 2.9 million times. This means that the number of applications that have become available has tripled since launch. Among the five most popular application categories – accounting for 61 per cent of the downloads – are tools, games, lifestyle, multimedia and productivity. The biggest increases over the week and a half are in the tools, games and productivity categories. The two applications with the highest number of downloads were Pac-Man by Namco and The Weather Channel, each being downloaded between 50,000 and 250,000 times.

According to Medialets, downloads are driven by a core of 41 applications, which account for between 73 and 83 per cent of all downloads. In comparison, the App Store for Apple's iPhone launched with more than 550 applications, although only 130 of them were free.